Microsoft includes a bunch of non-Azure products under their cloud revenue. And they do it to confuse people and falsely claim they're outpacing AWS, which as you just proved, works.
Because SaaS isn't cloud computing. SaaS is essentially a fully available software application that you don't run on your own machines.
There's similarities, but key differences that you can easily look up to better understand. Hence part of why most aren't huge fans of including O365 to claim Azure's bigger than AWS.
If the claim is that Azure is generating more revenue than AWS, then yes I would say that is misleading.
If the claim is that Microsoft's cloud revenue is bigger than Amazon's, I would assume that includes Office365. Office365 isn't just Word and Excel on the desktop, it's Outlook, Dynamics CRM, Sharepoint, Teams, etc.
Whether or not a company is taking full advantage of Outlook, Flow, Sharepoint Online, etc doesn't really matter in terms of revenue. If a company is paying for cloud products, that counts towards Microsoft's cloud revenue.
Even if the bulk of the Office365 ecals they're selling are for the lowest tier offering that still includes Outlook and Onedrive which a lot of organizations use fairly heavily.
Exactly! Microsoft is exploiting the “cloud” buzzword when including Office 365. I’m sure old baby boomer investors/advisors/managers couldn’t tell the difference. They want to be in the “growing cloud space”. Office 365 is just a continuation of the monopoly Excel and Word have on the business software market
I'm pretty skeptical of your claim there. I'm happy to admit I'm wrong if that's truly the case, but let's see some reputable references that backs that up first. I haven't been able to find anything that substantiates that claim.